As I am sure you are aware, most countries for the time being have a ban on importing Canadian Beef. Because of this, Beef prices in Canada (Alberta in particular) have fallen through the fucking floor. Like a god damn rock with shit smeared all over it. Because of this, I can go to my friendly neighborhood butcher tommorow and buy Butchered, cut and wrapped beef to spec for around $1.60 per/lb. This is everything, be it ground beef or T-bone and Porterhouse steaks and rib roast. Everything. The farmer is now lucky to get 50-60c per pound (the rest of the price is in the kill, cutting and wrapping and freezing).
So, why in the blue fuck are grocery stores still selling their beef at top dollar? Fucking Safeway is having a big sale on T-Bone steaks for $8 a fucking pound. Lean Ground beef is still going for $2 lb (sometimes more!). Don’t even ask what the nice cuts are going for! They’re still $15+ lb!
Fuck you. Fuck all of you. You fucking grocery stores are making a fucking fortune on the backs of farmers right now. There is no fucking way the packing plants are still charging you what you were paying 3 months ago on your beef. If they are, CHANGE*. But no. You give oh, $1/lb on the price of something you would normally charge $10/lb for and you say you’re giving the consumer a good deal. Fuck you. You could sell it at a fair price and sell out of your meat. But no, you can’t have that. Fuckers. Unfortunately, most people (in the cities especially) don’t have the know-how nor the time to buy a side of beef themselves to get around these fucking robbers.
I can buy (hell, anyone can) an entire beef, the whole animal, slaughtered, butchered to your spec, and in your freezer for around $900 (maybe less). That would keep a family of 4 in red meat for around an entire YEAR.
I will never, if I can avoid it, buy meat from a grocery store again. You fucking thieves oughta get thrown in jail for collusion on prices.
We just had a big sale on filet mignon here in the Chicago area. $3 per lb. I stocked up! You better BELIEVE I stocked up! We’re doing filets two, maybe three times a week. Oh yeah! And they were “window” steaks…not “package” steaks.
Bryan, that killed me. Because here my mind was, way down in the gutter, and then I thought “that bernse, he’s probably being tricky to get me to read the thread. I bet he’ll rant about packaging his ice cream in a plastic bag that sweated on the way home!”
Well bernse, I give your rant a 10 for presentation and style but a 1 for content.
If the Invisible Hand of the market could post to the SDMB, he’d have a few choice words for you. I’ll try to help him out in his absence.
In short, the grocery stores aren’t being “robbers” or anything like that, they’re just being good capitalists, which is a good thing.
If the consumer keeps buying it, then the consumer is saying the store is giving the consumer a good deal. If enough consumers go to the local butcher instead of the grocery store, then the grocery store will lower its price to compete.
And there we have it, the reason for the price discrepancy. Either consumers don’t know of the existence of butchers (which seems highly unlikely to me) or consumers are willing to pay for the convenience of being able to buy beef in grocery stores instead of going to a butcher. If consumers decide that going to the butcher isn’t such a bad thing to do after all (or they learn of the existence of butchers), then they will start doing so and the price of beef in the grocery stores will drop.
Beef is a commodity, not too different from oil, gasoline, natural gas and the like.
If oil was one day, oh $40 per barrel and dropped the next day to $5 a barrel, even the eeeevil oil companies would reflect this at the pumps, even though consumers would have to buy their product regardless. Vehicles have to drive. Life goes on. Maybe not immediately, but they would nevertheless. Recent past history proves this. If they didn’t there would be an outcry louder than someone eating KFC at a PETA convention.
Not here. Nothing like this has ever happened before (at least to my knowledge). The grocery stores are not simply being smart capitalists, they are taking gross advantage of the situation.
I don’t know of anyone (in Alberta at least) that thinks their money is well spent with the prices they are paying at the store on beef right now.
You’re example is well taken, but the magnitude of it is not even remotely close. I manage a store. I deal with wholesale/retail prices and markup all the time. This is something that we simply would not be able to get away with doing to our customers. Hell, I wouldn’t even try.
I have long been getting strange looks from friends and families over my feud with Safeway. I hate those bastards, and this isn’t helping. Oh, as for free market and we can go buy somewhere else if we don’t like Safeway’s prices? The price is the same no matter where you go to buy beef. The only difference is that the smaller meat stores charge even more than Safeway usually.
They’ve been feeding us lines like “we have to use up current stock that we bought at the old prices”, but between you, me, and the post, that’s bullshit. The prices at Safeway only go one way, up. There’s a bad crop of oranges in Florida, the price goes up. It never comes back down again once the next, good crop comes in.
And finally, let me just say that I single Safeway out for my hatred because I believe that they are ass-reaming the public more than the other grocery stores, and they have the nerve to pretend that they’re all about customer service.
And why the fucking fuck fuckitty fuck fuck are gas prices still hovering around 1.80 in California. I mean jesus christ on a hovercraft, our taxes aren’t that fucked up that they need to guage the populous.
Fuck Mobil
Fuck Shell
Fuck Texico
Arco you’re pretty cool you can stay
Fuck Chevron
bernse, your problem is shopping at Safeway, an American company. They ship everything up from the US, including their prices.
Hell, I live in Vancouver, and I cannot get produce from fucking Richmond at my local Safeway. The company prefers to ship everything from California or Mexico even when cheaper, better quality stuff is grown less than 50 km from the goddamn store!
You can’t even get a BC apple at a Safeway here-- everything’s from Washington state!
Price fixing and gouging is illegal where I live. I suspect it is where you live too. This reeks of it. This is not following the heart of a free market economy, supply and demand. Not in the slightest. This smells of being artificially manipulated something terrible.
Wholesale prices have fallen through the absolute floor. It is to the point where meat and cattle are actually getting destroyed as not to make the situation even worse than it is. However, retail prices have changed very little, if at all.
If this was Oil or Natural Gas, you could bet your ass there would be commissions and commitees investigating this right now.
Barbarian, you may very well be correct. However, other stores such as Co-Op and IGA are the same way. I believe they get their beef from packing plants in Alberta.
